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Biography |
Becky Stark’s rise to the top hasn’t been easy. A
classically trained singer, she was advised to abandon her
beloved craft at the age of 17 due to her chronic asthma and
the physical limitations of her tiny stature. “I took it
really hard,” she recalls. In fact, Becky was so
disenchanted that she stopped singing altogether for the
next couple of years. “It was like I'd lost my voice,” she
says. “I wanted to sing… I just didn't want to sing that way
anymore.”
During those years away from music, she and her family moved
to Rockville, Maryland, where she discovered the power of
fusing music with politics in bands such as Fugazi.
Fortunately, this exposure led Becky to find a new way to
express herself while she attended Brown University -- Stark
and three of her friends formed a jazz quartet. The
experience instilled in her a strong desire to sing and
write music again, and she soon began rattling off
everything from folk songs to operas. Becky continued her
musical development when she formed Lavender Diamond, a
whimsical folk-country quartet, in Providence.
Becky and her band mates relocated to Los Angeles and have
since performed at major music festivals such as ArthurFest,
South by Southwest and the CMJ New Music Seminar. In 2003,
the band released the Artifacts of the Winged LP and the
Calvary of Light EP in 2005. Pitchfork Media hailed the EP
as being “an airy, cloyingly sweet modern twist of
yesterfolk nostalgia.” Lavender Diamond has toured with The
Decemberists, and although the group's music might not be as
accessible as other pop-savvy emo-type bands, it has
certainly picked up where Jewel left off before she veered
toward “Intuition.”
Becky continues to create music with Lavender Diamond, as
well as with another colorful side project called The
Mystical Unionists. Regardless of which band she takes the
stage with, her mission is always the same: “My intention
onstage is to make the most beautiful sound that I can
possibly make -- to make the whole performance exist as a
source of joy,” she says. |
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